John,
Trump and DeSantis built Alligator Alcatraz in the Florida Everglades as a blueprint for a nationwide network of black site detention camps. They threw up a sprawling tent city on an abandoned airstrip, packed it with nearly a thousand people at its peak, and then hid them from lawyers, journalists, and even their own families.
Inside those tents, people suffered through blistering heat, filthy water, overcrowded cots, and sewage-soaked floors. Insects infested the food. Toilets overflowed for days. Medical care was virtually nonexistent. Civil rights lawyers found migrants detained for weeks with no charges, no bond hearings, and no way to contact their families. Many were removed from ICE’s online locator system entirely, making them untraceable. That is the definition of a black site.
While lawsuits piled up, the administration rushed more than $245 million in contracts through the shadows to build a camp designed to avoid scrutiny and evade the law. What they built was a human rights violation.
Now they want to replicate it as other state-run detention compounds are being modeled directly after Alligator Alcatraz. People are being held in places deliberately engineered to escape public view. This is the infrastructure of a government that has decided certain lives do not count.
Congress must shut down Alligator Alcatraz and every ICE black site detention camp in America.
Across the country, immigrant communities are living with the terror of being disappeared into facilities that operate without transparency, oversight, or due process. Lawyers cannot get in. Journalists cannot report. Families cannot find loved ones who have been snatched from one facility and moved to another under the cover of secrecy. This system thrives on silence and confusion.
And still, Trump defends these camps, promising more of them and daring anyone to stop them. Black sites are not an accident of policy. They are an intentional strategy to dehumanize and isolate immigrants until the country stops looking.
Members of Congress cannot claim ignorance. They have the power to defund these sites, investigate these contracts, and demand the release and relocation of every person trapped inside. Every delay guarantees more suffering.
Every moment of caution allows another state to adopt Florida’s blueprint. If lawmakers do not intervene now, this network of shadow facilities will become a permanent part of America’s immigration system.
Tell Congress to shut down Alligator Alcatraz and every ICE black site detention camp in America now.
Together, we can end these black sites and protect due process for everyone.
- DFA AF Team
